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Hybrid Electric Vehicles

The one thing that should NOT be done is impose the change by government mandate. Just open up the market to new opportunities and let things progress from there.
Agreed without government intervention, you see a mix of ICE,EV, Hybrids, Hydrogen all being serviced and that's how gasoline got started as well. Somebody brought a car to Vancouver, a run around looking for "gasoline", supplied by a local hardware store, finally enough cars for a station and then two and then.....
 
How is hydrogen produced, and is that more efficient than simply using the input energy directly to power a vehicle?
 
How is hydrogen produced, and is that more efficient than simply using the input energy directly to power a vehicle?
That is a real good question and one that I think the market is best placed to answer. There are a lot of unknown unknowns and moving targets but many approaches seem to be viable.

Keep one foot on the ground and keep the old technologies as new ones are introduced.
 
Not if any kind of subsidies or other arrangements are in effect.

All governments have the ability to influence or distort markets, even create or destroy them though. Sometimes they get it right and sometime not though. Do I like the government ? Do I like what it is doing? And how long do I have with this government in control?

My greatest fear, in political life, is that a government I support will be out of power. My greatest hope is that it will be in power.

It wouldn't surprise in the slightest to discover that Mesopotamians subsidized the manufacture of wheels.
 
How is hydrogen produced, and is that more efficient than simply using the input energy directly to power a vehicle?
Same electricity as created by (take your pick) hydro, nuke, coal, wind, solar, hamsters, etc.) Power density much better than chemical electrical storage and manufacturing of fuel feels notable cleaner than chemical batteries.
 
Of course, with hydrogen, will come the inevitable panic from the uneducated plebes.

View attachment 78599
True…and ignore that 2/3 survived, and those who died perished primarily from diesel burns…

I’m seriously going to look at the hydrogen option when the time comes. If I’m going to be forced into something more amenable to the State’s imposed transition, I’m going to make it something that is far cleaner that Greta and her Cobalt Kids…
 
True…and ignore that 2/3 survived, and those who died perished primarily from diesel burns…

I’m seriously going to look at the hydrogen option when the time comes. If I’m going to be forced into something more amenable to the State’s imposed transition, I’m going to make it something that is far cleaner that Greta and her Cobalt Kids…

If we're going to be made to live within the limits of the Rule Book then might as well exploit the limits of the Rule Book.
 
Same electricity as created by (take your pick) hydro, nuke, coal, wind, solar, hamsters, etc.) Power density much better than chemical electrical storage and manufacturing of fuel feels notable cleaner than chemical batteries.
Still hard to see whether this is a tradeoff between most efficient use of energy and least polluting. The latter might be true, but what is the total energy required to manufacture vehicle and storage system? Either the entire lifetime energy consumption of one falls below that of the other (clear advantage), or I'd expect the two curves to cross at some point (where "more efficient to produce but less efficient per km" climbs to meet and exceed "less efficient to produce but more efficient per km" at some elapsed mileage). Without obvious increases in electricity production Real Soon Now, we have to err on the side of energy efficiency at the expense of pollution.
 
Still hard to see whether this is a tradeoff between most efficient use of energy and least polluting. The latter might be true, but what is the total energy required to manufacture vehicle and storage system? Either the entire lifetime energy consumption of one falls below that of the other (clear advantage), or I'd expect the two curves to cross at some point (where "more efficient to produce but less efficient per km" climbs to meet and exceed "less efficient to produce but more efficient per km" at some elapsed mileage). Without obvious increases in electricity production Real Soon Now, we have to err on the side of energy efficiency at the expense of pollution.
In the business/government (revenue) sense, maximizing energy efficiency (to of course maximize profits/taxes, respectively) would support your approach at first glance. I haven’t seen the (a? Does one exist?) multi-year assessment of cradle-to-grave expenses for ICE(petro)/ICE(H2)/EV(chem/batt)/EV(H2), but I do not see adoration/cult like adoption of EV(chem/batt) as an excuse not to push hard for what is reasonably without a doubt the most combinationally efficient-clean technology out there (EV(H2)).
 
Still hard to see whether this is a tradeoff between most efficient use of energy and least polluting. The latter might be true, but what is the total energy required to manufacture vehicle and storage system? Either the entire lifetime energy consumption of one falls below that of the other (clear advantage), or I'd expect the two curves to cross at some point (where "more efficient to produce but less efficient per km" climbs to meet and exceed "less efficient to produce but more efficient per km" at some elapsed mileage). Without obvious increases in electricity production Real Soon Now, we have to err on the side of energy efficiency at the expense of pollution.
That should be err on the side of energy efficiency at the expense of PERCEIVED pollution. CO2 has yet to be shown to be a pollutant. It is a green house gas that is a common byproduct in nature and has known benefits in agriculture.
 
Still hard to see whether this is a tradeoff between most efficient use of energy and least polluting. The latter might be true, but what is the total energy required to manufacture vehicle and storage system? Either the entire lifetime energy consumption of one falls below that of the other (clear advantage), or I'd expect the two curves to cross at some point (where "more efficient to produce but less efficient per km" climbs to meet and exceed "less efficient to produce but more efficient per km" at some elapsed mileage). Without obvious increases in electricity production Real Soon Now, we have to err on the side of energy efficiency at the expense of pollution.

But doesn't everything involve balancing curves? Often more than two? I usually find myself looking at a number of scatter diagrams trying to discern lines in them and ultimately treating my problem as one of multiple poorly defined Venn diagrams.

And on the subject of diagrams...

Here is a fundamental fuel cell running on pure hydrogen and "dirty" air from the environment. The air supplies oxygen for the reaction that creates water from hydrogen and generates electricity.


1688230796551.png

The hydrogen can come from reversing the process and using the electricity to generate hydrogen from water. It is a neat trick but in needs electricity. Green electricity is the advocates preferred source with the intention of creating and storing and selling hydrogen. Virtuously pure but technically complex due the difficulty of storing the universe's lightest chemical.

1688227293438.png

Blue hydrogen aims to harvest the world's lightest chemical from a readily available fuel that is hard to handle but is a known commodity whose challenges are well defined. Very few unknown unknowns. But it requires central processing plants to convert into hydrogen and that conversion is best done close to the point of use. Could the plants be made small enough to generate H2 from CH4 and air at the local gas station? The waste products are CO2 and H2O. But if you want to get to Net Zero then you have to capture the CO2 and that is most efficiently done in a large central plant. Perhaps two or three in each municipality, or county, or province? Or one for the country?


1688227249000.png

Or maybe you just accept that something is better than nothing and that fuel cells with locally produced H2 already helps the movement towards Net Zero by radically reducing the CO2 output per MJ of energy.

If you embrace that principle then you can go a couple of steps further because fuel cells don't have to be fed pure H2, or even H, anymore than they need to be fed pure oxygen instead of dirty air. They can be fed with methane in a pure form, or as it exists in water gas, coal gas, swamp gas, waste gas, bio gas or natural gas or propane. They can even be fed with LNG. Or methanol. A liquid fuel that could be handled with gasoline infrastructure.

1688230759053.png

The fuel cell will scavenge the hydrogen it needs from the fuel it is fed, just as it scavenges the O2 it needs from the dirty air it is fed, and rejects the rest, along with the H2O and CO2 it creates.

Then it becomes a matter of costs and efficiencies and improving technologies and deciding when we are ready for prime time and what we are willing to accept.

That is why I believe, if we are at this point in the discussion, the market place is much better positioned to decide on the solution of the day rather than have the government try to pick the eternal solution.

Me personally I have always believed that half a loaf is better than none and that somebody will always find a better solution. I would start today with what is possible today and let tomorrow take care of itself.

I love the increase in efficiency from 30% to 60% when comparing the internal combustion engine to the fuel cell. That alone, regardless of the fuel used would cut CO2 emissions in half. More efficiencies can follow depending on the fuel used.

I also love the noise reduction and the elimination of moving parts. A tank of compressed gas supplies its own motive power. An advantage of gases over liquid methanol which would need a noisy onboard pump.

And the technology has now been powering buses and submarines for twenty to thirty years with constantly improving membranes and other materials.


Personally I would accept the use of minimally processed "dirty" fuels that work with "dirty" air as the primary fuel sources for transportation purposes because they would demonstrate an immediate improvement over the existing gasoline and diesel systems and could be improved over time.

Carbon Capture and Storage systems work best, I believe, with large scale, and thus centralized, processing facilities of any type. Blue Hydrogen will suit municipal power plants that use Natural Gas and Alberta just fine.

Green Hydrogen will also work fine to power Quebec, Ontario and BC that have access to lots of Hydro. It will also work well for those places willing to invest in Nuclear Power.

Wind and Solar? I am still not convinced about them as primary energy sources. The equipment still seems to me to be too small scale and requiring too much maintenance and too frequent replacement as they age and wear out.

.....

Ever since I read Heinlein and Clarke I have been fascinated by energy. When I read "Powering the Future" I was hooked on the benefits and intrigued by it North Vancouver connection. But I filed it away under "Future" and "Canadian".

I am glad that you lot have re-awakened my dormant interest.

Another reason I love this site.
 
Except in a site completely isolated from the grid(s), there is not really any completely "green" electricity. And if we're able to produce more "green" energy, the pressing demand is to use it in lieu of "not-green" electricity.
 
Overtaken by events.

Green Hydrogen?
Blue Hydrogen?
Grey Hydrogen?
Now White Hydrogen?

Where do you find White Hydrogen? Why down abandoned oil wells.

“We never found much hydrogen before because we weren’t looking for it,”
“It’s a colourless, odourless gas, so it is not easy to spot."

Pilot project extracts hydrogen from orphaned oil wells​

A hydrogen production pilot project in Saskatchewan could be the start of a new resource economy in Canada, industry insiders say.
Michael Bramadat-WillcockJul 15, 2020 8:10 AM

A hydrogen production pilot project in Saskatchewan could be the start of a new resource economy in Canada, industry insiders say.

"We plan to supply 10 per cent of the world’s energy needs in the form of exported hydrogen by 2040,” Proton Technologies CEO Grant Strem told Canada’s National Observer.

First of its kind in the world, Strem's method can extract hydrogen from orphaned oil wells and repurpose oilfields to produce close to zero-emissions fuel.

The new extraction method is being tested near Kerrobert, Sask., and could change the way we power our economy.

"Our province looks forward to being the home of the world’s first zero-emission hydrogen oil reservoir extraction technology,” Kindersley MLA Ken Francis said.

And this is not just a flash in the pan....

Limitless ‘white’ hydrogen under our feet may soon shatter all energy assumptions​

There’s a real possibility that vast reserves of this clean fuel can be extracted at competitive costs
AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD13 July 2023 • 6:59pm

Every few years a disruptive technology comes out of left field and entirely changes the future of the global energy system, smashing into our consciousness like a thunderclap.

It happened with shale fracking around 2009-2011, confounding OPEC, Russia, and an opinion establishment still hooked on the great red herring of peak oil.

America went from an alarming energy deficit to become the top exporter of oil and gas within a decade. The dollar came roaring back. So did American power.

Today’s exuberant rush for “white” hydrogen has the same feel.

We are suddenly waking up to the very real possibility that vast reserves of natural hydrogen lie under our feet and can plausibly be extracted at costs that blow away the competition, ultimately undercutting methane on pure price.

Scientists have long argued that pockets of exploitable geological hydrogen are more abundant than hitherto supposed.
The perpetual burning gas at Chimaera in Turkey – believed to be the source of the Olympic flame – has a hydrogen content reaching 11.3pc. There is another such marvel at Los Fuegos Eternos in the Philippines.


It has been known since 2012 that hydrogen beneath the village of Bourakébougou in Mali has 98pc purity. The site was discovered in the 1980s when it blew up in the face of a local man smoking a cigarette while drilling for water.

Professor Alain Prinzhofer from the Institute of Physics in Paris found that the gas flow remained constant over time – the pressure even rose – confirming a hypothesis that hydrogen can keep renewing itself by a chemical reaction underground.

What is new is that the world now needs that hydrogen and is acting on the insights.

The US Geological Survey concluded in April that there is probably enough accessible hydrogen in the earth’s subsurface to meet total global demand for “hundreds of years”

The US Energy Department is drawing up plans to help kick start the industry, deeming the potential “astronomical”.

Viacheslav Zgonnik, a Ukrainian geologist, thinks white geologic hydrogen could be so cheap and abundant that it conquers the energy market.
“We think that we can reach $1 a kilo in the long-run and provide baseload power 24/7. It can be compressed for storage in steel tanks. It is not that expensive,” he said.

(Edit - a kilo of Hydrogen is 120 MJ of Energy - a liter of diesel is 38 MJ of Energy - so a kilo of Hydrogen is equal to 3 liters of diesel and a liter of diesel is selling for $1.50 - White Hydrogen at a buck or Diesel at $4.50?)

If so, that raises awkward questions about the eye-watering subsidies going into green variants (from electrolysis) and blue variants (natural gas with carbon capture).

Green hydrogen costs $3 to $4 today. (Edit: Equal to the Retail Price of Diesel?) It will become cheaper with scale, but getting much below $2 will be hard: you currently lose 70pc of the original energy in the making (Edit: of Green Hydrogen) , and it requires a massive electrolyser industry that does not yet exist.

Are the EU, the UK, Japan, and others, barking up the wrong tree with their hydrogen strategies?

And is the vogue for drilling bans in Europe an ecological own-goal? Hydrogen wells use much the same drill kit as the oil and gas industry, with some need for modification since hydrogen degrades metal piping, and the tiny molecule leaks easily.

“We can get to scale faster than with green hydrogen and without using up the land surface that you need for renewables.

“It makes much more sense to leverage up the potential of natural hydrogen. But if you look at the grants, they are all going to green hydrogen projects. That needs correcting rapidly,” he said.


Today’s wildcat drilling for hydrogen is very like the early days of fracking in Texas and Pennsylvania.

Europe's biggest natural hydrogen discovery was made in the Lorraine (Coal) Mining Basin in France.
(Edit: This is the same basin that caused the Franco-Prussian War, WW1 and WW2 and resulted in the CSCE, Euratom and the EU - Karma).


In May, Française De l’Énergie and researchers from GeoRessources made Europe’s biggest discovery to date, finding 15pc hydrogen content at a depth of 1,100 metres.

It is not contaminated by corrosive gases and can be separated easily. The next step is to drill to 3,000 metres, where the purity is expected to reach 90pc.

Hydrogen is produced in vast quantities from a constant chemical process in the earth’s crust and mantle, but is also made in pockets where water reacts with iron-rich minerals.

It works its way upward,
mostly eaten by bacteria along the way, or turning into long chain hydrocarbons when it bumps into fossil deposits. (Edit: Renewable oil deposits? Whodathunkit?) Scientists had assumed that little survived the journey. Geologists are now proving that they were wrong.

Gold Hydrogen has hit accumulations with 80pc content at 500 metres in the Yorke Peninsula of South Australia, the frontrunner of the global hydrogen rush.

Australia has already created the world’s most advanced regulatory and permitting structure. Natural Hydrogen Energy, co-founded by Dr Zgonnik, is drilling in Nebraska. China has begun exploration in Inner Mongolia.

“We never found much hydrogen before because we weren’t looking for it,” said Professor Jon Gluyas, a world expert on natural hydrogen at Durham University. Mass spectrometers and sensors were not set to detect it in normal drilling.

“It’s a colourless, odourless gas, so it is not easy to spot. You are not going to find it with oil because the hydrogen bubbling up from below reacts with it,” he said.

The one place where they did try to detect hydrogen was the old Soviet Union because of a (false) hypothesis that it was a geological marker for oil and gas deposits.

They discovered it in rich volumes across much of the country. That is the likely template for the rest of the world.

The big oil and gas drillers are watching from the sidelines, just as they did at the start of fracking. “Investors want to see the first demonstration that you can drill for hydrogen on purpose rather than finding it by accident,” said Dr Zgonnik.

The critical breakthrough will probably happen somewhere within a year or two.

South Australia has emerged as the frontrunner in the global hydrogen race

Whether it then takes off at scale comes down to costs. Will it really be as cheap – or cheaper – to drill for hydrogen as for methane, and will the purity be high enough? “Most people think 10pc is probably the cut-off,” he said.

The trade-off on costs is much like geothermal energy. You have to find the sweet spot where the yield is enough to justify drilling, but not so deep that drilling expenses run wild. The limit is probably near 3,000 metres.

Hydrogen has a little understood and incalculable advantage over fossil fuels.

“The bore hole can theoretically produce for ever, just like geothermal. You don’t have to keep redrilling, and you don’t have the decline curve of oil and gas. That changes the economics of the project drastically,” Dr Zgonnik said.

Prof Gluyas thinks natural hydrogen will quickly displace dirty grey hydrogen (3pc of global CO2 emissions) used in refining and the chemical industry, mostly from natural gas made by steam reforming, which doubles the cost. “It’s going to be much cheaper,” he said.
Future uses will then go down the “hydrogen ladder”, replacing fossil feedstock in fertilisers, steel, cement, back-up power for renewables, shipping and jet fuel, depending on the carbon price.

“Nobody has yet made a commercial discovery ready for the market. As soon as one happens, there is going to be absolute frenzy,” he said.
The next net zero billionaires might well be gas explorers drilling holes in the ground. The surprises never cease.
 
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